Judith Deim

Sunday, July 26, 2009

Judith Deim was born in St. Louis in 1911 into a large family of artists and musicians. Judith painted as a child, sketching on the banks of the, Mississippi Rivet, achieving an artistic kinship with the American south that has resurfaced in current work.

On a Macmillan Scholarship, Judith attended the St. Louis School of Fine Arts where see met her future husband, painter Ellwood Graham. In the 1930's they moved to the Monterey Peninsula where Deim received Federal Arts Project commissions for murals at the Salinas Children's Hospital, the Ventura Post Office and a Veterans Hospital in Washington DC. Judith befriended John Steinbeck. She painted the acclaimed portrait of Steinbeck writing his first draft of The Sea of Cortez at her studio in 1941. Later, Steinbeck funded a painting expedition that Deim and Graham made to central Mexico.

Until 1950, Judith painted and exhibited under the name Barbara Stevenson. The San Francisco Museum of Art held her first solo exhibition, sparking a string of venues that included the San Francisco Palace of the Legion of Honor and the Santa Barbara Museum of Art. In 1945, her solo show in Manhattan earned high praise from New York Times critics, describing her work as "vigorous," and her as "a new and promising talent."

Deim's international career began in 1950. She painted and exhibited in Mexico, Guatemala, Europe and Africa. Later, Judith found her greatest inspiration in the gypsy and flamenco cultures of Spain. In the 1980's and 1990's, Judith focused her travels closer to the U.S. and in Indian villages in Michoacan, Mexico.

For the last 20 years Deim divided her time between Patzcuaro, Mexico, and Northern California. Fiercely prolific, Deim's paintings are featured in the National Biennial of Mexico, "This Side of Eden" in California, and in "The Passage of the Muse," a collaboration with her granddaughter, the Flamenco dancer La Tania at San Francisco's Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.

Deim found mid-century acclaim as a California Modernist. Her work today approaches the subjective milieu of Magic Realism. Of her 50-year retrospective in 1996 in Carmel, a critic wrote, "Deim's paintings breathe with figures and animals captured in the adventure of a moment at once carnal and mythical."Judith Deim passed away peacefully and in her own home on August 2, 2006.